While it might be difficult to imagine the yuletide without one, Christmas trees are a relatively recent phenomenon: decorating trees only began in the mid-18th century.
But what began as a quaint, sustainable custom has since morphed into a display of merriment that isn’t without consequence.
From irrigation to pesticides, manufacturing, packaging, transport and disposal, the life cycle of a Christmas tree – real or artificial – carries a significant environmental burden.
If you were only ever going to use one Christmas tree in your lifetime, it stands to reason that a natural, biodegradable option would be preferable to a plastic one but, since the lucky among us will erect more like 50, the answer isn’t so clearcut.
The more (reuse) the merrier
There are already millions of artificial trees in existence – so using those until their bedraggled end will be more environmentally friendly than buying a felled pine every year. My grandmother lovingly trimmed a 1950s eyesore that, by the time it was retired at the turn of the century, looked more like a spoked pole wrapped in silver tinsel than a tree. Despite our family’s half century-long devotion to it, its components will still sit in landfill somewhere for another 400 years.
While many stats are bandied about in the great Christmas tree debate, Nina Gbor, the director of the Circular Economies and Waste program at the Australia Institute, says that globally there hasn’t been enough research into the complete lifecycle impacts of Christmas trees for consumers to have any reliable way to discern the carbon footprint of their individual choice over a lifetime.
While it might seem logical that a real tree would be less harmful, thanks to its carbon sequestering capacity and biodegradability, Gbor says that depending on how it was grown and how far it travelled, as well as how it’s disposed of, that isn’t a given. About 85% of Australians reuse fake trees and, in some cases, an artificial tree you will use “indefinitely” would likely be a more sustainable choice, especially if you’ve bought it second-hand, she says.
Thea Kerr, the nursery manager at Ceres in Melbourne, says that while it is possible to put real trees to work in your garden after Christmas “the needles are very acidic” and aren’t suitable as general mulch.
Gbor says she isn’t aware of any research tracking the fossil fuels involved in manufacturing, growing and shipping trees “as well as how many end up in landfill, or are burned each year. It’s really intricate to measure that and no one, as far as I know, has actually done that footprint calculation.” In short, if you plan on having a tree more than a handful of times in your life, there is no reliable rule of thumb.
The field of studying Christmas waste, Gbor says, has only gained traction in the past few years and researchers “haven’t landed on a consensus [on trees] because the considerations are so variable and complex”.
Stay rooted in tradition
With so little to go on, the sustainably minded might rush to Pinterest, ready to embark on a crafty solution, but for those that crave a festive fir there are alternatives to depressing cardboard monstrosities or the abject grimness of a “ladder tree”.
Gbor says that the most sustainable choice, if you have an artificial tree already, is to “keep using it for as long as you can”, then donate it to charity or to buy a decent quality second-hand fake tree and use it “hopefully forever”.
If plastic pine needles don’t do it for you though, there are other real-life options.
Kerr suggests buying a potted native that you can drag inside year after year. She says Wollemi pines and woolly bushes are great options. “I’ve had [a Wollemi] for 20 years. I got 10 years out of it as a [potted] Christmas tree but now it’s bigger than my house.”
Wollemi pines are more expensive than a single-use felled pine – a 50cm tree costs about $100 – but by buying one you’d be contributing to the regeneration of one of Australia’s oldest and most critically endangered species. Woolly bushes tend to be sold when they are much smaller and cheaper – a 20cm plant can cost less than $10. Some varieties will grow up to 20cm per year and can survive for decades in a reasonably sized pot.
If becoming a full-time custodian of a tree feels beyond you, in Melbourne old friends Katie Stark and Barbora Williams have a unique solution. For the last three years their business Holly and Berry has been ferrying hundreds of pines from Williams’ farm in Murrindindi to tree-renters across Melbourne.
They currently have about 650 Monterey pines and have recently added 100 Norwegian spruces to their fleet. They’re also “playing around” with a woolly bush option for the future. In the off-season the trees are sustained by a drip-irrigation system supplied by rainwater. For now the pines range in size from tabletop options to magnificent seven-footers. It’s at about that point that the trees will be retired into a forest.
Some regulars go back for the same tree every year. “We even have kids who have named theirs, send it postcards and ask for pictures of it throughout the year,” Stark says.
Tired of seeing kerbside “Christmas tree graveyards”, Sydney florist Little Flowers now offers replanting options for the potted trees they sell. For no extra charge they will collect them once festivities are over and give them a happy retirement at a regenerative farm in the southern highlands. It’s their third year trialling the program and, with a number of other farms interested in taking on the trees, they are looking at a paid option to collect any cast-off conifers and rewild them.
Gbor endorses such initiatives and hopes they take off on a larger scale: “It would be such a great cultural moment if the first thing people thought of was renting a tree rather than buying one … in the long run [these kind of options] could have a significant impact.”
